


learn to look me in the eye

by kalks



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: M/M, and they're all sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-04
Updated: 2019-11-04
Packaged: 2021-01-23 01:07:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21311590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalks/pseuds/kalks
Summary: He puts a linen napkin over his head and tells you to do the same, tells you a story about shame and humiliation and hummingbird heads.
Relationships: Greg Hirsch/Tom Wambsgans
Comments: 9
Kudos: 130





	learn to look me in the eye

You’ve never been the richest, or the smartest, or the most well-liked. You’ve always been tall, though. Tallest guy in any room. Always had that going for you. But eventually, at twenty six, you reach your limit. Or, more accurately, your limit is reached for you. The scratchy, sleep-laden voice of your mom saying _ what the fuck, Greg _is somehow a more humiliating blow to the ego than feeling vomit slide across your soft palate before it splashes through the mesh eye-holes of a theme park costume suit. You think you could’ve lived with that humiliation, all things considered. Could’ve turned it into a funny anecdote for all those basement parties your friends used to drag you to, could’ve told it to a room of equally underachieving, equally stoned community college graduates. Maybe that way you would have caught the eye of some pretty girl holding a half-empty beer bottle, maybe leaned in real close sitting next to her on the couch, asked her if she had a boyfriend. But you’ve never been great with girls. Too highly strung, too skittish, never able to say the right thing at the right time. You catapult yourself towards your extended family to get away from the humiliation of your old life, and you realise too late that it’s going to follow you around no matter which name you go by, no matter how much money you make. 

* * *

You meet a guy. He has wide, quizzical eyes and a warbly too-loud laugh, and you can’t tell the difference between when he’s making a joke and when he’s being serious because he’s pretending to be something else so often that it all bleeds together. _ Would you kiss me if I asked you to? No, if I told you to? _ You’re putting up with it because he’s your ticket in, your foot in the door. 

He takes you out under the guise of teaching you how to be rich, but past all the belligerent comments about your appearance and bloviated grandstanding you know he’s overcompensating. Under the dim mood lighting of the wildly expensive restaurant, his features look softer. Warm dark eyes, straight Roman nose, expressive brow. The picky pursed mouth is still the same, except light pools in that little rivulet of a scar running across his top lip. His hands shift restlessly on the table like he’s playing cards with an invisible, shadowy deck. He wasn’t poor, not by any measure: McMansion in the Midwestern suburbs with a back porch and a white picket fence, a brief stint at one of the more modest Ivy League colleges, enough industry connections to get him into Waystar Royco. You can tell that he _ feels _ poor though, can see it in the rigid set of his shoulders around your extended family, the loud honking laugh and the smarting, hurt eyes. Regardless of his generous start, he made it all the way to the top of the food chain, only to realize that the real predators are more vicious with their own kind than they are with their prey. You think about this in the wildly expensive restaurant while he puts a linen napkin over his head and tells you to do the same, tells you a story about shame and humiliation and hummingbird heads. Under the creamy gloom of the napkin, you remember those Rene Magritte paintings of two people with white bags over their heads. They used to hang in your college counsellor’s office. _ The Lovers. The Lovers II. _You think about foreheads pressed together, cloth-covered mouths slotted neatly over one another. You know all about shame, about humiliation. The linen napkin doesn’t help.

* * *

You have always been prey. You’ve been easy prey since you were an awkward, lanky kid eating TV dinners by yourself, when you grew into an awkward, lanky teenager smoking pot out of a water-bottle bong, after you cut your own hair in the bathroom mirror of a motel room and didn’t eat a proper meal for two weeks because all your money went to a suit to wear to work. He treats you like prey, but he doesn’t know how to be vicious like the other predators. He bats you around like a housecat that’s had its claws removed, and eventually you get past all the bullshit and his whole act becomes transparent, like the glass walls of the conference rooms on the top floor of the company. You still can’t tell whether he’s joking or not when he says something nice to you, can’t tell whether he really means it when he says something volatile. But you can tell the difference between when he’s talking to have a conversation and when he’s talking just to deflect attention away from the sad slope of his mouth and the notch of a frown in his brow. Eventually you can’t tell if he’s your lifeline in the sludgy soup of corporate life or if you’re his. 

* * *

Your second-cousin is a mess. Actually, all of your second-cousins are hideously fucked up, but you feel as though this one has had it the worst. But you bring him baggies of white powder and bottles of expensive spirits anyway because—well, because you’re told to, but also because he’s good company. In his own weird, sullen way. Mostly, you like him because he’s quiet, and because he doesn’t give a shit if you aren’t wearing the right shoes or if you don’t know dinner table etiquette. It goes the same way every time. You watch reruns of _ Jackass _ on the flatscreen with him and dip your fist into the bag of sugary kid’s cereal he offers you every once in a while. You wonder if his kids eat that, or if Rava gets the help to buy Wholefoods stuff. You can’t believe he has kids, and something aches in your chest at the thought of them growing up with a father so broken down by his own that he couldn’t be one for them. You kick his ass at _ Call of Duty _ because this was the only game your friends ever played in high school. You oblige when he asks, voice low and slurred, if you’ll tell him stories about growing up in Minnesota. You tell him about TV dinners, water-bottle bongs, Canadian Christmases at your grandpa’s place, climbing trees and getting stuck, breaking your elbow learning to skate. He likes it best when you talk about your friends from high school: stories about getting kicked out of class, their mistakes with girls, band practice and shitty late-night shows, ordering food on their bikes in drive-thru lanes and getting banned from all the fast food joints in town. The time they got egregiously drunk at some house party in senior year and you had to chase them through the woods because they’d collectively decided to _ go camping or some shit _. 

You think he likes the simplicity of your old life, the mundanity of it. He’s too used to the luxury life corporate empire money buys to actually want to trade places, but you think it’s an escape for him to imagine it for a couple of hours. You vaguely think it’s easier to get lost in the nostalgia of a picture-perfect memory than it is to face up to real life, just like how it’s easier to snort lines and drink spirits and lock yourself up in your own head as if it’s a five star penthouse during fashion week. You don’t wonder if he’s ever had real friends, because it makes you sad to think about it. You tell him you’re leaving one night and your face flames with the fire of humiliation as he asks you in a bored tone of voice if you’re going to see him. The other him. You ask why you would go there in the middle of the night. He throws you a flat look, eyes droopy and glassy as a Bloodhound’s. _ Oh, _ he says, still sharp even when he’s high. _ So it’s not like that. _ You make an excuse and leave before he can explain what _ like that _ means, even though you already know. 

* * *

When you tell him you want to leave ATN because it makes something awful churn in the pit of your stomach, it’s more out of panic than anything else. The whole thing is like some sort of cosmic, nightmarish sign that you need to get out. You sit on the clean white counter of the small office space that’s _ allegedly _ a panic room, and he swivels forward on the wheels of a soft leather desk chair. You mumble something about _ a giant _ , your brain moving too fast and your mouth moving too slow, something rehearsed and reverent to soothe his ego slipping out by accident. His mouth twists into a self-deprecating little smile, and it blooms into something else as he looks up at you, and for a second you think _ I can’t do this. _

But you do it anyway, and his face crumples up for half a second before it steels into a vague semblance of neutrality. And he paces an agitated little zigzag around the room, big broad hands with the neatly manicured nails skewing up the neck of a cheap plastic water bottle as he tries and fails to get the cap off. And you look at the nondescript label and you recognise it as the brand you used to stock shelves with at the 7/11 back home before you got fired, and you recognise the humiliation in him as his palm slips a little on the flimsy coloured film. You feel anxiety bubbling up in the pit of your stomach and sizzling around in your throat, and you don’t know what it was that you said but you do know what something in there had cut right into a soft, vulnerable part of him that he tries to pretend isn’t there. And then it’s a couple blunt slaps of pain to your shoulders and torso, and you’re crowding yourself up by the wall of the _ stupid, _ too-small panic room. And he’s pelting you, and in the midst of all your awkward protests and the useless shield of your upturned palms you’re too panicked to just come right out and say, _ just talk to me, we’re the same! I understand you and I understand your humiliation, so stop throwing it all at me and accept that we’re the same! _

But the moment passes, and the flurry of plastic stops, and it’s just you slumped against the desk and him hunched in a chair on opposite sides of the room, and now the panic room that isn’t really a panic room feels cavernous, just silence and a sea of discarded bottles strewn around on the floor. 

**Author's Note:**

> fuck it homoeroticism in the chat


End file.
